Wednesday, April 26, 2017

Jimmy Wales and the Wikimedia Foundation are launching an interesting new kind of news site, Wikitribune:

Wikitribune is a news platform that brings journalists and a community of volunteers together. We want to make sure that you read fact-based articles that have a real impact in both local and global events. And that stories can be easily verified and improved.

Citizens should totally be able to publicly criticize the state's math without an engineering license. I'm glad the Institute for Justice is taking the state to court and I'm glad to be a financial supporter of IJ.

I'm always a little bit cautious about stories discussing neuroimaging and the law. But this preliminary research looks intriguing:

This study uses neuroimaging and machine-learning techniques to reveal
different
brain activities correlated with these two
mental states. Moreover, the study provides a proof of principle that
brain imaging
can determine, with high accuracy, on
which side of a legally defined boundary a person's mental state lies.

Curiously, the USSR "Dead Hand" doomsday system may have been for the Soviet nuclear commanders' benefit:

Dead Hand, it turns out, may not have been primarily a deterrent
against the Americans launching a nuclear attack against the Soviets,
but rather was a Soviet-built safeguard to prevent themselves from
launching a nuclear attack unnecessarily.

Monday, April 17, 2017

On Wednesday, a Burger King television ad likely became the first
ever to intentionally trigger smart devices like Google Home and Android
phones. In the commercial, an actor faces the camera and clearly
enunciates the phrase, "Okay, Google. What is the Whopper burger?" at
the end of the advertisement.

Around the country, the audio clip
prompted a response on a number of devices, with phones and smart
speakers listing off the ingredients in the burger from the Whopper's
information page on Wikipedia.

Friday, April 14, 2017

Harris and his team built the 65 kits required for testing with a
trio of 3-D printers in his home office, each plastic part taking as
long as 24 hours to fabricate and with his three children, ages 11 to
15, often overseeing sanding and wiring. HTC produced the models for
Peng’s team...

The
competition’s tricorder, weighing five pounds or less, has the
potential to revolutionize home health care. It can tell a person
whether he or she has pneumonia or diabetes or other conditions, while
monitoring blood pressure, heart rate and other health vitals.
Additionally, it can share real-time information with medical
professionals and could help millions of patients in medically
underserved communities.

Thursday, April 13, 2017

Most experimental research (like this study and this study and this study)
has found that intoxicated eyewitnesses are actually no different from
sober eyewitnesses in their account accuracy or vulnerability to
distortions. One study
published this year even found that consuming alcohol after witnessing a
crime made witnesses more reliable, by making them less likely to
accept false details given to them by the researcher...

For April Fool's Day, Reddit launched a little experiment. It gave its users, who are all anonymous, a blank canvas called Place.

The rules were simple. Each user could choose one pixel from 16
colors to place anywhere on the canvas. They could place as many pixels
of as many colors as they wanted, but they had to wait a few minutes
between placing each one.

Over the following 72 hours, what emerged was nothing short of
miraculous. A collaborative artwork that shocked even its inventors...

Apple is currently hard at work on a “completely rethought” Mac Pro,
with a modular design that can accommodate high-end CPUs and big honking
hot-running GPUs, and which should make it easier for Apple to update
with new components on a regular basis. They’re also working on
Apple-branded pro displays to go with them.

I also have not-so-great news:

These next-gen Mac Pros and pro displays “will not ship this year”.
(I hope that means “next year”, but all Apple said was “not this year”.)
In the meantime, Apple is today releasing meager speed-bump updates to
the existing Mac Pros...

Patients routinely disclose sensitive personal data to their physicians. Doctors can and should be mindful of information that might someday be used against their patients by unscrupulous government authorities.

In particular, with increasing use of electronic medical records that can be data-mined by those with access, physicians can help protect the doctor-patient relationship by leaving some information out of the records.